B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum

Tell us about interesting projects involving biblical Greek. Collaborative projects involving biblical Greek may use this forum for their communication - please contact jonathan.robie@ibiblio.org if you want to use this forum for your project.

James Ernest wrote:Sounds like you're all set. I was surprised when he told me Polebridge was planning a new edition because I thought that was what y'all were doing. In the normal course of things I never see the Polebridge folk--just kind of fell into their booth at SF.

Polebridge does plan to publish a new edition - I was not aware of a concrete date but I haven't asked recently. They also plan to use what we've done as a starting point, last I knew.

Hello, I am new around here, and can't make too many promises given my circumstances and demands on me, but I have these books in paper form: it seems that largely there are folks already doing all they can to get you covered on that end, but until then, is there anything I might do to assist given that I have that resource available?

Polebridge does intend to publish this grammar again. They are starting with the versions we have online - I have some fixes to apply before I send them a CD with the current status. They will do extensive work to put this into a form they would be proud to publish.

We will retain the right to keep what we have online. I may have more to announce during the year.

cwconrad wrote:The whole question of how Koine Greek texts were written and pronounced in the era of our concern has arisen anew in the proofreading work that Louis Sorenson and I have done on the soon-to-be-published third edition of Funk's Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek (see viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1691&p=9117#p9117)

The link takes us to a post that is restricted.Tell us more about the 3rd Edition of Funk. I'm particularly interested in whether the section on middles will be revised.

No, this is essentially a carefully refornatted and corrected version of the BIGHG as scanned and prepared for our BG web site (http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/f ... pre-alpha/). The grammar itself has not been revised --- there's no new account of the middle voice. Initially it will probably be a print-on-demand publication. What this publication does is make possible a textbook for classroom use by those who want it and a reference work on Hellenistic grammar that will be ready at hand in a hard copy. The work has been out of print since 1977.

Alan Patterson wrote:Can the BIGHG be edited by the user/buyer if purchased in electronic form?

Or, can Carl write us a new chapter on voice?Carl plays jazz, does he dabble with Funk, too?

Some answers, ὕστερον πρότερον:

No, I don't play jazz (except when I tune in to that channel on my radio.

I don't imagine that an electronic format of the Polebridge 3d edition is being contemplated, nor, would I supposethat, since it's copyrighted material, any such edition would be editable by users. We've been told that we can keep ourelectronic edition accessible on the web, but Polebridge's formatting will be better and much more accurate thanour own electronic version; Louis Sorenson has done much to correct errors in our own version, but the proofreadingfor the Polebridge edition has been much more extensive in restoring the fruits of scanning and OCR toward Funk's original text..

Louis and I have been cognizant of some items in the 1977 edition of BIGHG that deserve fresh formulaton, and thetreatment of voice morphology and usage is surely one of them. We were in agreement, however -- it was never questioned -- that this was Bob Funk's work and that it should be made available to the public now after so many years out of print, not something that we should attempt, particularly in our role as proofreaders, to "improve." We continue to believe that this is the most intelligently-presented course in Hellenistic Greek grammar and a reference work well worth having in hand and on one's library shelf if one is serious about understanding the hows and whys of Hellenistic Greek. I don't doubt that Linguists can find fault with its treatment, but in my judgment (for what it's worth) this remains the most "linguisticallly-informed" presentation of Hellenistic Greek grammar of resources available to students and teachers.

I can and perhaps should endeavor to compose a fresh pedagogical formulation of my understanding of ancient Greek voice morphology and usage -- but I wouldn't conceive of this as a revision of what BIGHG offers on these matters. I'm well aware that the PDF files of my earlier efforts to explain ancient Greek voice as listed at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html are outdated. The outline on that page sets forth the elements of what I believe now about ancient Greek voice, but that outline really needs fleshing out. It's a project, but ἐάν τε καὶ ὅταν πληρωθῇ ταῦτα remain open questions.

I hope that's reasonably clear and doesn't leave unsaid anything that I should have said about the Polebridge Press publication of BIGHG.

I know this may not be the place for it, but since you brought it up, I thought I'd voice my gratitude. Your observations on middle voice, outdated or not, have been of tremendous help for both me and my students. I can't tell you how relieved they were, after having already studied Latin, to be able to set aside deponency. Being able to condense the middle/passive/deponent morphological categories to simply medio-passive and then subsequently dealing with the semantics of the verb has clarified the middle voice for them in a way that Crosby and Schaeffer never could. I'm definitely looking forward to an updated version of your observations. Thanks for all the work you've done thus far.